3i has invested €2.6 million in shopping search engine Twenga. Similar to other shopping search startups, Twenga is a meta search engine for products from online merchants. Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons.

There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. It’s a crowded space and to distinguish themselves companies have been focusing on advanced features such as deep product feature search (Retrevo) or price trend tracking (Mpire) to stand out. There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie, and many more. Google had it’s own notable stumble in online product search as well.

Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop. It also focuses on Europe and comes translated in an impressive six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants

With so much choice, there’s no excuse to not get the lowest price on your Christmas gifts.

The internet is supposed to be a place of intense price competition, but you can’t always find the best deals on any one site. To solve the problem, online price comparison search engines were born. We’ve covered a few newer ones before, such as TheFind and Mpire, although these sites also include a variety of other features.

Bountii is a new price search engine started by two founders from the latest Y Combinator class. They focus on the incredibly popular and competitive category of electronics, currently crawling over 30 merchants. Bountii says they differentiate themselves from other price search engines by digging deeper into the prices. Their data includes shipping and handling, and finds especially low prices normally hidden from basic searches, like the ones Costco only shows at check out. The system can add shipping and handling by zip code.

But the real test is how well it finds low prices. While it’s by no means comprehensive, I ran a simple test across some pricing search engines for the term “lg 42″ plasma hdtv”. While the search experience varied greatly, the numerical results I came up with were as follows: TheFind ($962.65), MySimon ($1099.99), Mpire ($968.09 inc. S&H), Bountii ($1057.86), Google (listed $968.09 but really $1,061.95). Price Grabber was the most frustrating. The initial results listed $799 as the bottom price. However, you find out that it’s for a refurbished unit. The actual price was $983.53, which you find is $1043.43 with shipping and handling.

While not the lowest in this case, Bountii was competitive. I can imagine the results would be different on another product. The sites that did the best found this deal at Ritz Camera, which has free shipping and handling.